Principles

Principles of Company

• Purpose / Vision / Mission

  • Start with a long term view. It should always be clear and well understood, even if it doesn’t remain fixed. “Figuring out our vision” is a valid purpose to start with.

• People

  • Struggle to find the best. Not always possible, but a compromise on talent carries an outsized opportunity cost, including a detrimental affect on morale.
  • Hire trustworthy people, then trust them.
  • Value people highly and show that they are valued. Though not at the cost of being able to achieve the Purpose.

• Value Proposition

  • Understand deeply what value is offered by the company, the dynamics of the value over time, and what distinguishes your value from others.
  • When identifying stakeholders, keep a keen eye on anyone with a veto.

• Evolve

  • Set up a “machine” that is the business execution.
  • Evolve the machine.
  • Continue to adapt the purpose, people and value proposition.

Principles of Business

• Set goals and expectations. Foster ownership of them throughout the team.

• Understand well.
  Gather information and fight bias. In particular understand reality (e.g. “the market”), external forces (e.g. cycles), and internal “machine” dynamics. Always be able to answer questions like “is this worth the investment”.

• Risk management.

  • Identify your risk appetite. Are you risking your company on a belief and vision, or does your business need to sustain your company at all costs?
  • From the Goals and a sufficient Understanding, identify and evaluate Risks that prevent achieving the Goals. Focus on the big ones and mitigate/eliminate them.
  • Risks are usually opportunities.
  • Product Management example: SVPG Big 4 Risks
  • Similarities here to Theory of Constraints.

• Trust, Delegate, Develop

  • You have hired trustworthy people; trust them.
  • Distribute power to the edges.
  • Continually identify areas for growth, and purposely work on them.

• Maintain standards

  • Capture data and information about the calibre of the execution and business performance. Use these to generate insights into the standards being applied, and make improvements.
  • Relates to:
    • Bias towards high expectations. Compromise is necessary, but can become a habit that rusts the strength of a structure.
    • Continuous evolution. Complex systems evolve, they are not linearly designed. Be oriented to identify when evolution is necessary, and be set up to benefit from change.

Principles of Product Management

• If the main endeavour of the company is the development of a product, there is some established industry wisdom. A flavour that I have come to appreciate is the SVPG Empowered Product.

• Consider the path to product success as a burndown of risks. SVPG describes four key risk categories; are there any others? As above, a Theory of Constraints style approach towards risk burndown is a method to evolve the product management machine towards success.

• Continually evaluate and decide; don’t assume continuation of a product. After a milestone, subsequent development investment defaults to “no” unless it can be demonstrated to meet business goals, company value proposition and continues to align with the vision. There is plenty else to get on with.

Principles of Engineering

• Development approach:

  • My deep belief that complex systems are evolved leads me to favour Agile style approaches.
  • This is balanced against the time value leverage associated with making decisions and taking action early. Where information allows, doing hard thinking upfront generally pays dividends. Be mindful of bias and over-confidence in such enabling information.
  • Further, evolution requires a feedback loop. Without the opportunity to iterate, you are taking one shot.
  • In practice, an optimal architecture of a complicated system is rarely knowable at the beginning, but a thoughtful architecture based on understanding the reality and context pays compounding returns.

• Right-size process.

  • A simple process often reduces risk.
  • Be wary of process-for-process'-sake. Process also has to justify its existence.
  • Process exists to mitigate a business risk; consider other mitigations.

• Tame complexity through Modularity

  • Decompose the problem into constituent elements.
  • Coupling vs cohesion - apply at all layers
  • High quality Interfaces. Be strict on what you transmit and forgiving on what you receive (where possible, i.e. with redundant information)
  • Produce a model to help with analysis and communication
  • Be mindful of emergence - behaviour and usage.

“Question & build” vs “Accept & do” -Mark Lutter.